Ecologies of Visibility: Assembling the Politics of Mobility through Multiple Practices of Knowledge Production

(In)visibility is part of discussions on the politics of human mobility, both empirically and theoretically. Scholars have recognised how becoming visible can be a resource for migrant subjects to make political claims, while it may also make them vulnerable to violence. Similarly, invisibility has been understood as both the result of exclusionary practices by political authorities and a conscious choice on the part of mobile people to escape mechanisms of mobility management. The argument of this thesis is that to fully understand the political stakes of (in)visibility one must take into account how forms of (in)visibility are produced in situated ways by a variety of actors, beyond political authorities and mobile people themselves. (In)visibility as such is the outcome of multiple, entangled processes of knowledge production which assemble migration by alternatively seeing or unseeing its subjects, spaces, timelines and dynamics, producing multiple "ecologies of visibility”. Such practices include efforts to memorialise migration, the artistic curation or disposal of migratory debris as well as forensic investigations to identify the victims of border death, and have no univocal outcome. In order to analyse these dynamics, this thesis examines the construction of the Gateway to Europe in Lampedusa, the exhibition of a boat wreck at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and finally the forensic investigative operation carried out after the shipwreck of 18th April 2015. Each of these cases shows how material traces (a landmark, a wreck, and human remains) contribute to the production of multiple “ecologies of visibility” which entangle with one another and produce contextually both forms of seeing and of unseeing. In so doing, they shape the frames through which migration is made intelligible as a political and social phenomenon, constructing its political horizons